芳斯瓦-費德里克.基 / 貝多芬：第29、30號鋼琴奏鳴曲 (芳斯瓦－費德里克．基, 鋼琴) Francois-Frederic Guy / Beethoven:Piano Sonatas

Beethoven's Piano Sonatas no.29 and no.30, published in 1819 and 1821 by Artaria and Schlesinger respectively as Opus 106 and Opus 109, are among the fundamental works he wrote for the piano. Moreover, Opus 106 is one of the few sonatas composed specifically 'fur das Hammerklavier' and not 'pour le piano-forte', Artaria having undertaken to publish two versions of it, one in German, the other in French. It is the German term that asserted itself, and the Grose Sonate has ever since been known as the Hammerklavier Sonata. And large this sonata was from every point of view: its scale is gigantic, and its structure is both original and vast. It is one of Beethoven's first works to abandon the traditional harmonia procedure of descending in fourths or fifths in favour of progressions in descending thirds. These progressions, typical of his 'last period', endowed the whole with a new harmonic colour that Schubert was not slow in appropriating. The splendours of this 29th Sonata manifest themselves within the first few bars and go on to unfold themselves in the longest and most sublime Adagio Beethoven ever composed for the piano. The final fugue, of an unprecedented contrapuntal richness, was hardly understood in its time and continues, in the words of the composer, 'to give pianists a hard time . . .'. Written for the most part at Modling in the summer of 1818, the Sonata op.106 was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph. The first movement contains thematic material Beethoven had originally conceived for a 4-part chorus, Vivat Rodolphus, intended for the name-day of the Archduke of Austria.

The Sonata op.109 shares its origins with another, and far more ambitious, choral work, the Missa Solemnis, the great undertaking on which he was working from 1819 to 1821. Sketches for both works (as well as for the last piano sonatas, op.110 and 111) are inextricably mixed up in Beethoven's sketchbooks. According to Schindler, the genesis of the last three sonatas was due to an article in Die Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, in which it was intimated that Beethoven, drowned in the composition of the Missa Solemnis, was finished. Even if the article might have deeply offended its 'victim', there can hardly be any doubt that Beethoven had other irons in the fire and that the origins of these three new compositions were due to quite different considerations. In this respect Opus 109 in teeming with absolutely thrilling conceptual novelties, beginning with the astonishing first theme, which seems to prefigure a romantic prelude from the harmonic world of a Schumann song. And indeed, the Sonata ends with a dazzling set of variations on a sublimely simple theme, Gesangvoll mit innigster Empfindung, mezza voce (Song-like and with the most ardent feeling). Probably composed in the summer of 1820, the thirtieth Sonata was dedicated to Maximiliana Brentano.